Official Creation Star Trek Con Philadelphia 2013 Day 2 Coverage

Let’s not dilly dally, let’s jump right back into my coverage of last weekend’s Official Star Trek Convention. Saturday featured all the big name guests, including Nana Visitor, Michael Dorn, Avery Brooks, Cirroc Lofton, and the costume contest. And if you missed it, go back and read my Friday coverage.

Saturday

 
Saturday started out bright and early with part two of Richard Arnold’s presentation on Deep Space Nine, which was good, because it meant you weren’t really missing anything if you showed up late. It was just more slides and a bit of back stage banter, but if you’ve read the DS9 Companion, it wasn’t anything new.

The first interesting guest of the day was Nana Vistor (Kira Nerys), who looked absolutely amazing for her age in a bright pink dress and funky Geordi Laforge inspired glasses. She was asked about her time on Family Guy, and said she loves Seth and his love for the shows, but she’s kind of gotten over the show. She was watching one of the Christmas shows (Road to the North Pole), where there was an especially grisly scene of like a family murdering each other (that I cannot seem to find on youtube to include here), that really got to her as she was watching with her husband. As the credits rolled at the end of the episode, her husband pointed to the screen and went “Nana, the mother was you!” She had completely forgotten she had voiced the character that troubled her so. A fan asked her if she was aware that during the early seasons, they tended to focus on her butt alot, like she’d have an argument with Sisko in his office, then storm out, and the camera would linger for maybe a little too long. She laughed it off, especially when the fan mentioned that it seemed to stop right around when she got pregnant in Season 4. She says she wasn’t too surprised by that, but was very flattered. Toward the end of her time, Armin Shimerman and Michael Dorn crashed the party to ask her silly questions.

 
Next up was Cirroc Lofton. Now, usually at these shows, Avery Brooks is the insane one. He was still pretty insane, as we’ll get to, but Cirroc took things to a whole different level of crazy I’ve never seen before at a convention. He spent his entire 45 minute time allotment telling a long winded story that was supposed to be about what he has been doing since the show went off the air. It started normally enough, talking a bit about his time staring in The Hoop Life, but things quickly went off the rails. He started talking about his African heritage, and how he took a trip to Ethiopia with his aunt, and how he was invited to a special ceremony by the elders of the town he was in to see the Ark Of The Covenant, and how after seeing it he had weird dreams of village children sitting on his chest asking him if he saw inside the Ark and that if he touched it and was unworthy he would die. He also said he tried to sneak some pictures of the whole ordeal, and all the pictures he took came out fine except for the one he took of the Ark itself that came out all blurry. Yes, he really said all this, and talked about it nonstop for 45 minutes. It was very uncomfortable. People were taking out cellphones and checking their email and playing Angry Birds, it was pretty bad. One guy stood by the mic for almost 40 minutes to ask a question and didn’t get to (It’s OK though. It was that guy every con has, who you’ve seen at every other con in the tri-state area for the last 5 years asking guests bad questions. He’s well over his allotment and didn’t miss anything).

 
Trying to follow up on that train wreck, Michael Dorn (Worf) was out next. He spoke about how fans tend to give him prune juice as a gag gift, as his character was fond of it. However, he can’t bring himself to throw out perfectly good prune juice, so he tends to just shove it in the back of his fridge, usually having like 10 bottles at a time in there. One day his mother came to his house and was snooping around, and peeked in his fridge, and asked him “Michael, are you all right boy? I know a good doctor if you need one!”. Towards the end of his time, he too was interrupted, this time by Gates McFadden.

 
After Dorn was the costume contest. I missed most of it getting photos done, but caught the very end of it. The first prize winner was a very good Kai Opaka, complete with an orb ark. Second place went to a sexy 7 of 9, who didn’t really have the bust to pull it off, but was still quite fetching in a skin tight silver body suit none the less. And for some reason, there was a dude as Rocket Raccoon from Guardians of the Galaxy. He tried to play it of as a ferasan or some shit, but that is clearly Rocket Racoon. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not Star Trek.

 
Closing out the day was Avery Brooks. If you’ve never been to a panel of his, it’s pretty surreal. He tends not to answer any questions with definitive answers. He tends will simply reply with simply “yes” or “no”, or something non committal like “Well what do you think?” or he’ll just walk to the other side of the stage when he determines he’s done with a question. All throughout his time, at random intervals he would yell out “I still see you!” to the people in the back of the room. He tended to end almost all of his responses with a “Ya dig me?”. I felt like I was Butters. “Yes sir, I dig you, you don’t have to keep asking”. Many of the people there were first time con goers, and you could see their frustrations as they asked him questions. He did his usually blathering on about how he wouldn’t have made different choices, because we are all here now where we are as the people we are now because of the interconnectedness of our decisions, and the relationship between Divinity and the tribes of Africa, and other crazy shit he always says rather than directly answering anyone’s question. The only question he really seemed to answer was about his physical appearance in the early seasons, and why he had to have the hair, and didn’t shave his head and grow the goatee until after The Next Generation was done its run, and he said he always thought it was so he “wouldn’t be confused with [Patrick] Stewart”. While he was aloof with most adults who asked him questions, he was very sweet with all the children who asked him things, bringing them up on stage and giving them hugs.

 
So that was Saturday’s happenings. Come back tomorrow for Sunday coverage, which featured dick and fart jokes from Rene Auberjonois and Ethan Phillips (I’m not even kidding), Gates McFadden, Chase Masterson, and Aron Eisenberg.

JohnScott is the proud owner of a life size replica Captain Kirk Chair. He is a hoarder of Comic Books, Transformers, and Star Trek action figures. He attended Space Camp as an adult. He has taken vacations to the closing of the Star Trek Experience and the final night Shuttle launch. He has been known to yell at his television when the kids can't put together the damn statue in the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. When not writing for InsufficientScotty, he is a Software Engineer for a major healthcare communications company. You can Email or follow on Twitter @NotEnoughScotty or Facebook